I have been terrible at keeping up with this blog and I would feel bad about that were anyone to actually read it, but since very few do I don’t really care all that much.

Essentially, grad school has been kicking my ass all over the place and I didn’t have time to really keep up with writing. Things have slowed down a bit leaving me with precious free time I can now use to occasionally write. Unfortunately, in order to get to this slow time took a ridiculous amount of work the past week and a half. Three exams in six days to be exact.

How’d I do? I’d rather not discuss that other than the fact that I’m probably going to have to retake one of the two courses (hopefully not both…) I’m currently taking next year. I will take what responsibility is mine: it was my own damn fault I didn’t get the grade I wanted in my anatomy course. It was taught very well and I thought I knew the material, but I just turned out to be wrong. Oh well, no big deal, I’ll just take the two exams next year without going to class, get a better grade, and be done with it. That was not the case with the other class I’m taking.

You see, in the sciences the professors have two duties to the university where they work. Their primary purpose is to bring in loads of grant money and do research to get even more grant money. Their secondary purpose is to teach students (mainly grad students). This is a FAR second. Essentially, you can be the worst teacher in the world but as long as you keep bringing in money you can still get tenure, but the school, for some fucking reason, still wants you to teach the occasional class. In theory, this is a fantastic idea. World renowned experts teaching students about what they know better than practically anyone else in the world. In practice, it’s one of the worst ideas ever. The reason is simple: most people are terrible teachers and no amount of knowledge is enough to counteract that lack of teaching ability. So what happens is SuperProf comes in to teach a class on something like the somatosensory system and spends nearly two hours going over what appear to be random powerpoint slides. People ask questions and SuperProf tries to answer, but s/he can’t really get the point across to the students because s/he DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO TEACH. Then comes exam time, and even though you’ve read the book and spent hours pouring over SuperProf’s slides you still can’t make sense of anything but the most basic information s/he tried to teach you and you get fucked on the exam questions.

Haven’t gotten the grade back on that exam yet, but at least everyone else in my class felt just as clueless as I did on the questions from terrible profs.